


Ouroboros

by altairattorney



Category: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Gen, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 07:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12206892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: He could never imagine there were more, or how many, or whether he will someday get another.





	Ouroboros

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RenMorris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenMorris/gifts).



**Ouroboros**

That is just how it happens: a white desert with him at its core, his eyes open on nothingness, then doubt.

It is not his norm, he thinks. Sheogorath knew where and when he was long before he was himself. A mere wave he was, in the circular sway of the all-encompassing mind – and there, before time and space began, his one gentle instinct consisted in finding his place.

This is not him, for sure. The human vessel, then. Who else could it be? He forgets, sometimes, how the broken ones aren’t always the easiest to take over. It gets trickier when the damage twists their insides beyond any repair – when he sees his essence mirrored in them, to the extent that he himself, at one point, cannot tell their torn souls apart.

So this is the landscape of the mind he fell in, he realizes, treading faster and faster on a sand which is dangerous and slippery. Nothing left, all lost. A flat expanse of grief. 

Denial.

Something inside Sheogorath screams so loud that everything comes to a halt, and the desert shatters in a million pieces.

* * *

 

He dies for the first time. 

It may be obvious to this shell of a hero, bent on the gashes across his chest. No experience equals the last defeat. Life is, to him, a one-time chance he has lost. 

He could never imagine there were more, or how many, or whether he will someday get another.

He cannot let reveries occupy his mind. There is room for so little in his foggy present – his cold stone deathbed, the pain, and a marble god whose wings greet his field of vision with the last embrace.

On the warm hands those wings used to be, he dwells for but one second. It hurts to remember them, or their arms, or the knees next to his hurting body.

And what Martin told him in between tears returns, painfully inevitable, as the little warmth he has left slips out of his wounds. Though his sacrifice must be for everyone else, he said, he would have gladly died just to save him.  
  
So he dies too, failing for them both. He doesn’t have enough time to shake off the feeling that, in ways and plans he is not aware of, something went wrong.

He dies, and somehow he knows – it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

* * *

Everything went too well.

Such a short time, a contained number of losses, and his faith, and  _there’s always a way_ ; it sported a magical precision, the chain of events which set Martin aflame in front of his eyes.

It was too easy – so his asunder heart believes. It happened too fast. And if his breath stops now, if Martin leaves his survival to drift alone across the future, it is hard to ignore the fact he couldn’t stop him.

Quite the opposite, the lonely champion starts to realize. As hard as he tried to save him, Martin slid smoothly in the opposite direction, as if the story of his death had been written in the bed of a river. 

There is no going back, his grief says, wordlessly screaming his surroundings out of existence. It just ended like this.  
  
And maybe – so the voice in his head whispers, before the world goes out like a light – it always has.

* * *

 

Everything chooses to come to a halt on the doorstep of the Temple.

There his feet become too heavy to move, and Martin’s wrist lies still in the iron grip of his hand. The universe becomes a game of mirrors, and in waves, throughout his consciousness, the truth washes over him.

He barely perceives the new Emperor’s voice, wondrously firm, yet rife with urgency.

“There is no time left, my friend. He walks among us. I’ve got to go, I am the one who must end this.”

The warmth in his words is no longer enough. The thread of the hero’s life ties in with it all – the dreams and the hints and the echoes of memories, spread over more than one eternity for sure. 

“Not you,” he replies, trembling. “It had to be me. I had to…”

There he meets Martin’s eyes, puzzled and terrified, right as the truth fully forms on his tongue.

“I don’t… I never wanted to see it happen again.”

Neither has a chance to let his words sink in. Their mortal bodies are swept away in unison, so the gods may play their own games in the Arena.

* * *

 

“You are going to die.”

It comes to him around the fireplace of Cloud Ruler, late at night, next to an exhausted Martin who has long drowned in his work. The warmth they share, sat side by side, turns into glacial pain.

Not that it’s new –  it is just an answer. The last piece he awaited from his fresh, useless awakening.

Silence is the only response. The deep brown eyes, alight with orange tones, speak of stupor and a grave resignation. He reaches for Martin’s fingers, to find their skin also reminds him of ice.

Like marble in the winter, abandoned, touched by snow.

He shivers.

“Don’t ask me… I just know. I do not know, I… I remember. But…”

He lets his tears roll with his memories, to form an architecture more complete with each passing second. He traces the map of every event, of the signs he used to ignore, of the fixed points he was never good enough to change.

Water stains the floor, inevitable, like his awareness of the point they find themselves in.

Alive and warm in the bloodbath of the flames, Martin is there. For now. 

“I can’t… I can’t do anything anymore. It is already too late.”

* * *

 

“You cannot do this!”

He knows he lies. After all, it is what happened every time.

It all rests inside his head. The heaps of memories he began to accumulate since the distant time of his awakening, washed up, with every cycle, at the sides of his mind. 

Harder and harder to tell apart, they crush his heart with their weight, ever growing around the painful costant who – once more – will not breathe in front of him for long.

He holds the memories of every time he has failed. Lynched by a mass in a Mythic Dawn nest, around a Mankar ever unreachable, like a myth out of space and time; pierced by the arrows of the Blades, whenever he tried to keep the Amulet from them; sliced by the blade of an assassin, to fall, defeated, upon Uriel’s corpse. In each longer time he has spoken, feverishly, of it all. Like the ravings of a madman.

There is nothing he has left to cling to, if not Martin himself.

“I can, and the reason is that I must,” he says again. The hero never hears – he has no need to, for his words are burnt in his memory. He watches Martin’s angular lips seal his fate, soundless, with the regal grace of a star. 

It shouldn’t be like this, the hero’s mind roars. Not again. He never counted anything in the balance of the world, and yet – and yet –

_Not anymore._

“Don’t go,” he commands, firmer than ever around Martin’s wrist. “If you believe me, there will be another way.”

And the walls come crashing under Dagon’s touch, and Martin prays in the glory of his growing wings. His goodbye is lost to the suicidal hero, who spills his blood on his last words like a sacred ritual.

So that it may work, the red ink says. Next time. Next time. Next time.

* * *

_He dreams of Martin on his coronation day, clad in the safety he believes to have granted him at last. Rich robes support his hair, finally soft and clean. Until his dream remembers itself, everything stays fine._

_It is a nice dream, that of changing fate. As good as it is fragile._

_The whirlwind of chaos gets to him at the pace of the assassins, the fire portals reopen for eternity, and death without an end falls upon the world._

_He wakes up screaming._

_He wakes up screaming, too._

* * *

 

Legend goes in Sanguine worship circles that, once in an era, a worshipper under Moon Sugar stupor will see the truth in a bonfire.

It is the type of rumour Martin forgets about – even more so in the sacred nights like this, spent under moons that twine within infinity, and a swaying breeze of madness flows from fingertip to fingertip.

Sooner than he knows, Martin’s eyes are fixed on the fire. He begins reading shapes in the yellow swirls at the top, in the dying embers, and the still untouched wood at its limits. 

A cycle of life and death, repeating itself eternal. It is the basis of this universe – and it appears to him, revelation and guidance, to whisper the way in his ear.

When Martin awakens, a scream echoes in his chest. It remains within himself, protected by the stupor. But what unfolds in the space of that scream, no matter how repetitive, is everything.

Martin sees every time, every death, every rebirth. He sees all that was and how it changed, in the warm bubble of this truth – this dream.

He sees it long enough for his eyes to shine. One moment later, Martin is asleep.

After that night, his waking mind forgets. But the visions of the bonfire remain and grow, twisting vines on the ground of his unconscious. They leave their trace in silence, even beyond a death Martin rejoins a few years later.

Many more times they slumber – and they dream, themselves, of the sunlight they will meet someday.

* * *

 

In the first rays of dawn, survivor of a tragedy he no longer struggles to change, the shell of a hero rides to Weynon Priory. 

For the first of countless dawns, at the opposite side of his path, a fugitive priest of Akatosh rides to meet him where he is expected.

There are no words when Martin’s hands open his own abruptly, and knowing fingers hold his own between the chain of the Amulet. The hero watches it slip around his neck, with ease and perfection that can only belong to fate.

According to plan, he thinks. He cries in silence. This time, it does not last long.

”Not anymore,” Martin whispers to him, lifting his chin. “From this time on, I live.”

It sounds like a promise.

* * *

By the time Sheogorath’s voice dies, the world has returned to him.

No trace of whiteness in the landscape of his mind. An explosion of colour and grotesque vegetation, roots that reach deeper, mouths of putrid caves.

He is back to normal, at long last. He can go home.

On his way to the palace, Sheogorath dwells on the mortal once again. He feels his soul twirl on itself, safely. It lays to rest now, far from every care, in a special corner of his mind.

There, his tormented human vessels are left to chase themselves, until the moment they reach all they used to long for.

It feels like a nice dream, the one he is creating. A vibrating reality in regular waves. And maybe, in some distant corner of the universe, the touch of this little man’s desires is already shaping a different time.

Oh, it works just like that. Sheogorath knows. Some void and clay, for anyone to mess around with a little.

Who is the dreamer, after all?

**Author's Note:**

> A champ!Sheo story about, so to say, alternate timelines, incorporated in a way that absolutely doesn't contradict canon. I was dying to try out the concept in Oblivion. It draws a lot of inspiration from my favorite anime and also Twin Peaks, my favorite Western anime. As always, gift to @renmorris , born from one of our AU discussions. Also born from the song "Who Will Save You Now" by Les Friction.


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